"Free-riders"

By Jonathan Martin

03/31/10 09:48 AM EDT

Expect to here that phrase quite a bit from Mitt Romney in the months ahead. It's central to his explaining why his Massachusetts health care plan, like the new federal law, requires individuals to purchase insurance. And he's going to use it whenever he's asked about similarities and differences between the two approaches.

It may not be easy to convince a conservative base that believes the mandate is an encroachment on individual freedom, but Romney's case is that the requirement is actually fiscally conservative.

Speaking last night at Emory University in Atlanta, he made the pitch. It's worth noting that, when the same question came up on Monday in Iowa, he made no mention of the Scarlet M. And, for that matter, also note that he initially referred to it last night as an "incentive" before mouthing the M word.

“We passed in Massachusetts a health care bill that makes sure, that if you lose a job or change a job, you won’t lose your insurance. Everybody in Massachusetts is able to keep insurance throughout their life. It’s not taken away from them. So it’s portable.

“No. 2, you can’t be cancelled if you have a pre-existing condition or if you become ill once your insured. So everybody’s insured. Ninety-eight percent of the citizens in our state are insured. So in that respect, it’s very similar.

“And we also have an individual responsibility. We have an incentive — a mandate, if you will, to say we need everybody insured. The reason we did that was pretty simple. We had a lot of people showing up at the hospital without insurance — people who had the money or funds to buy insurance, who said, ‘I got no insurance. I’m real sick. Take care of me.’

“And the government was paying for those people. That’s what’s happening here, and in the other states in the country. There are people who — we call them free-riders — who say ‘I’m not going to be insured. I can’t pay my own way. If I have an accident or have a heart-attack, the government will pay for me.’ We say no more. You’ve got [the] responsibility, a personal responsibility, to get insured.